“While God gave to man a capacity to labour, He also gave him a right to the object (the earth) on which that labour must be employed to produce the necessaries of life.  This gift of God is to all men alike.  No compact or consent or legislation on the part of one portion of the community, can ever justly deprive another portion of the community of their right of their share of the earth, and of its natural productions.  No arrangement or agreement or legislation of men now dead, can justly deprive the present inhabitants of the earth, or any portion of those inhabitants, of their right to labour, and to labour for their own profit, on some portion of the earth which God has given to man.”—­PATRICK EDWARD DOVE, Elements of Political Science. 1854.

“Our postulates are the primary perceptions of human reason, the fundamental teachings of the Christian faith.  We hold:  That—­This world is the creation of God.  The men brought into it for the brief period of their earthly lives are the equal creatures of His bounty, the equal subjects of His provident care....  Being the equal creatures of the Creator, equally entitled under His providence to live their lives and satisfy their needs, men are equally entitled to the use of land, and any adjustment that denies this equal use of land is morally wrong.”—­HENRY GEORGE, An Open Letter to Pope Leo XIII. 1891.[228:1]

Here, then, we must bid farewell to Gerrard Winstanley.  We are uncertain as to the place and year of his birth; we know not where he lived, nor where or when he died; yet his words still appeal to us, prompting us to cast off the blinding and distorting spectacles of convention and custom, to look the facts of social life fairly and squarely in the face, and boldly to proclaim whatever social truths reflection and study may reveal to us.  Such are the lessons which his life and teachings seem to us to inculcate.

What Winstanley regarded, and what a steadily increasing number of earnest students to-day regard, as a fundamental social truth was revealed to him; and right well he gave expression, by words and deeds, to his strong and well-grounded conviction of the equal claim of all to the use of Mother Earth, to the use of the nation’s natural home, workhouse and storehouse, whence, by labour, everything necessary to life and comfort can alone be derived.  Winstanley realised, as they to-day realise, that to admit in the abstract the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man, to admit the equal claim of all to life, and yet to deny the equal claim of all to the use of God’s Earth, to share in those blessings which the great Father of all men has lavished upon His children, and which form the only means by which life can be maintained, is but hypocrisy and cant.  The “rights of property,” the financial interests of the privileged classes, the Elder Brothers, the so-called “power of the capitalists,” may be based